Chapter 744: Plans For The Cannons [Bonus - ]

Chapter 744: Plans For The Cannons [Bonus Chapter]

Silas watched the two of them with a quiet grin and stepped up to the base of the cradle. He laid both palms flat against the cool metal of the chassis.

Even without a core stone or a drop of mana running through its lines, Titan-01 had an undeniable weight to it.

It was built wide and low, its four shoulders set to spread recoil evenly across its broad back.

The two primary arms hung heavy, tipped with thick iron fists that looked like they could punch through a castle gate, while the two smaller arms mounted higher on the torso held clamps, cutting jaws and fine brackets for heavy tools.

"The engineering really is ridiculous, Solenne," Silas said, studying the joints with genuine appreciation. "Once we swap out these scrap plates for the cobalt-steel and dampening alloys we brought back from Sterling Enterprises, this thing’s going to be a monster..."

"Y-Yes, Lord Silas!" Solenne beamed as her ears snapped upright and her tails swished in happy sweeps. "With proper alloys it’ll carry at least four times the load! The fluid lines won’t blow their seals anymore!"

The three of them circled the machine together for a while.

Thora crawled right under the cradle on her back to look up into the hip joints, muttering under her breath and tapping every bolt she could reach.

Solenne knelt beside her and pointed out each linkage, her tails swaying while she explained how the four shoulders shared the weight.

Every time Solenne explained another trick she had used to make cheap scrap do expensive work, Thora’s eyes got a little wider and her muttering got a little louder, until she was slapping the flagstones with her palm in sheer disbelief.

Silas leaned against the cradle and watched them, a dwarf and a nine-tailed fox lying side by side on the cold stone under a twelve-foot machine, pointing at the same bolt and talking over each other.

The Greyrock girls had crept to the doorway of the testing room to peek in, and even they had stopped ogling him to stare at the golem instead.

"Speaking of your work," he said, stepping back from the cradle, "we’ve got the rest of your workshop right here too."

He focused his mind and reached into the deep orderly space of his Inventory.

VUUUM!

With a gentle shimmer of spatial mana, a big neatly bound bundle of thick drafting parchment appeared in his hands.

The stack was nearly three feet wide and rolled tight with coarse hemp twine, its edges yellowed and frayed from months of obsessive handling in a drafty workshop.

"Your blueprints," Silas said, and passed the heavy bundle to Thora, who caught it against her chest with an eager grunt as she rolled out from under the cradle.

Thora untied the twine with her teeth and unrolled the top three sheets right across the flagstones.

Detailed hand-drawn schematics sprawled across the parchment in crisp black ink.

There were cross-sections of piston assemblies, gear-ratio sums scribbled in the margins, strain curves for the dampers and full breakdowns of Titan-01’s four shoulder mounts.

Every single measurement was labeled with tiny obsessive precision, and in the corners of several sheets there were little doodles of Cogsworth carrying tea, a tiny fox with nine tails and a sun drawn over the workshop roof where no sun had ever reached.

"Sweet mother of iron..." Thora breathed, her amber eyes racing across the numbers. "Look at these fluid channels... She’s mapped the pressure all the way down!"

"And that’s not all," Silas chuckled with a fond smirk. "You can’t have the master artificer without her assistant."

He reached back into his Inventory.

THUMP!

With a soft puff of air, a peculiar little contraption appeared on the stone floor beside the blueprints.

It stood about three and a half feet tall and was built inside what was clearly a polished copper trash can.

It had a smooth domed head of brushed brass, a single large round eye-lens in the middle of its face that sat dark and unlit, and two long multi-jointed brass arms ending in delicate mechanical hands.

The whole thing balanced on a single heavy rubberized wheel... Clamped in one brass hand was an old copper tea kettle, and the other held a small wooden tray with two porcelain teacups balanced neatly on top.

Thora blinked and crouched down to poke the copper body with a finger.

"What in the rust is this little bucket?"

"That’s Cogsworth!" Solenne cried happily, hurrying over with her tails swishing. "He was my assistant back in the workshop! I had to switch him off before Lord Silas stored him!"

She reached around the back of the domed head, and her slender fingers found a tiny brass switch tucked under the rim of the copper casing.

CLICK!

For a second nothing happened then, deep inside the little machine’s copper belly, a soft steady clockwork whir began to hum.

Whirrrrr-clack-clack-clack!

A warm crimson light flickered to life behind the big round lens and brightened into a steady red glow.

Somewhere inside him a tiny flywheel spun up with a rising whine, and a puff of steam escaped from a vent in his lid with a polite little psst...

The single wheel shifted under its base with a tiny hiss and balanced the copper body perfectly upright.

The little domed head tilted to the left with a smooth click as the long brass hands adjusted their grip on the kettle and the tray, and from a perforated grille under the lens a crisp remarkably polite voice crackled to life.

"Good day, Mistress Solenne... I observe that the air here is much drier than at our previous residence. Would you, or perhaps your companions, care for a cup of tea?"

Thora fell flat on her rear, her jaw dropping open all over again as she stared up at the talking trash can.

"It... it talks?!" she sputtered, her amber eyes bulging as Cogsworth glided two inches forward on his single wheel without spilling a drop. "It balances on one wheel, carries a tea tray and talks like a high-court butler?! What kind of lunatic puts a voice inside a rubbish bin?!"

"He’s not a rubbish bin!" Solenne protested, puffing out her cheeks as her ears flattened. "His body just... came from an old refuse container... It was very sturdy copper!"

"Indeed, madam," Cogsworth said politely, his crimson eye pulsing with a steady light. "I assure you my insides are thoroughly clean."

Thora slowly climbed back to her feet and shook her head in disbelieving defeat.

"I give up. I’m retiring. I’m throwing my hammer in the river and opening an apple stand. A nine-tailed fox builds a twelve-foot golem out of scrap and a tea-serving copper bin... I’m out of a job."

Silas laughed out loud, thoroughly enjoying the chaos.

"Don’t retire just yet, Thora," he said, stepping toward the open space on the other side of the testing floor. "Because we didn’t just bring back frames and teapots."

He reached into his Inventory one more time and took hold of the four biggest things he had brought back from the Sterling depot.

VUUUUUUUUUM!

BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!

Four massive deafening crashes shook the testing chamber one after another and threw clouds of dust up from the floor as four huge Tier 2 kinetic mana cannons and their heavy wall mounts slammed down onto the flagstones in a long iron row.

The deep boom of the four cannons settling onto the scarred basalt left a ringing hum that ran straight up through the soles of their boots.

Thin curls of stone dust drifted around the heavy cast-iron wall mounts and coated the polished gray barrels in a faint powdery film.

In a single breath the testing room stopped looking like a workshop and started looking like the front line of a war.

Each cannon measured nearly fourteen feet from its reinforced breech to its flared muzzle, wrapped in thick dampening rings and nested recoil cylinders built to swallow thousands of pounds of kick.

Fine cooling grooves ran down the barrels and caught the orange glare of the lanterns, showing off the spotless machining of Sterling Enterprises.

Thora’s mouth, which had only just closed after Cogsworth, fell open all over again.

Solenne’s tails puffed out to twice their size.

Cogsworth’s crimson eye blinked twice, and he quietly set his tea tray down on the floor as if he had decided this was not a tea situation.

Silas stepped between the two middle carriages and laid his hand on the cold machined metal of the nearest barrel.

The steel was dense and smooth and still faintly humming with the memory of the test shot in Central City.

"Here’s the plan," he said, looking back over his shoulder at Thora and Solenne. "These four aren’t going to sit down here gathering dust... I want them mounted on the territory’s walls as soon as possible. Two on top of the main walls over the gate, and two along the sides to cover the flanks."

He paused, and his dark blue eyes moved from the cannons to the twelve-foot frame of Titan-01 across the room before settling on the two craftswomen.

"Mounting them is only the first step," he went on, his voice turning serious and practical. "What I really need to know is whether you two can recreate them... I don’t want Blessed Land running back to Sterling Enterprises every time a recoil spring snaps or a barrel wears out. Between the two of you, can we make these cannons and Solenne’s golems ourselves, with the materials we have?"

Thora didn’t answer right away.

She strode up to the nearest cannon with her amber eyes narrowed into two sharp slits and pulled a small polished brass-headed hammer out of a leather loop on her belt.

CLINK!

She tapped the reinforced ring around the breech and tilted her head to listen to the high harmonic chime that ran through the dense metal.

CLINK! CLINK!

She worked her way down the barrel, rapping the cooling shrouds, testing the play in the traversing gears and peering straight down the flared muzzle at the spiral rifling inside the bore.

Thora then ran a thick callused thumb along the seam where the fluid lines met the twin recoil pistons and checked for burrs and leaks around the bronze gaskets.

’The tolerances on this thing are disgustingly clean,’ Thora thought, tracing the smooth bevel of the breech block with her thumb. ’City craftsmanship at its most smug... No hammer marks, no rough welds, everything polished until you can see your teeth in it but metal’s still metal. It doesn’t matter what fancy city poured it. If you know how the grain flows and how the heat treats the core, you can copy anything.’

She stepped back and wiped a smear of dark machine grease onto the thigh of her clean canvas trousers then she tapped two fingers against her temple.

SHING!

A wide translucent blue tab popped up in front of her face and hovered in the dusty air of the testing room.

It showed a full live inventory of everything stored in the Distribution Nexus, the warehouse in the western courtyard, called up through its Instant Requisition from right where she stood.

Rows and rows of raw materials, refined ingots and sorted resources scrolled past her eyes.

Thora’s thumb flicked across the glowing list as she checked the cannon’s metal against what was sitting in the Nexus.

"Well," she muttered, scratching the side of her nose with a greasy knuckle as her eyes ran down the numbers. "The dampening chambers need a lot of dense alloy, and the recoil springs need clean tempered steel so they don’t snap... but looking at what we’ve got sitting in the Nexus right now? Yeah. It’s pretty possible."

Solenne leaned over Thora’s shoulder with her nine silver tails fanned out behind her and rustling eagerly against the floor.

Her long silver ears tipped forward as her golden eyes darted over the glowing rows.

Thora glanced up, gave a crooked smirk and tilted the floating tab toward her. "Take a look for yourself, Fluffy-Buns."

Solenne skimmed the first entries, and then her eyes landed on the deep storage.

"Eep!"

She let out a sharp high yelp of pure shock and both hands flew to her mouth!

’Mana Diamonds?!’ Solenne’s mind screamed, her thoughts reeling as if someone had slapped her across the face with a brass wrench. ’Crates and crates of them?! And star-flecked ore by the ton?! And slabs of virgin alloy stacked to the ceiling?! In Central City you’d have to sell your lungs and three generations of labor just to buy three ounces of this, and Lord Silas has whole warehouse wings full of it!’

Her tails puffed up into an enormous trembling silver cloud behind her and nearly knocked Cogsworth over.

"It’s possible!" Solenne gasped, her voice cracking with wild engineering fever as she looked back and forth between Silas and the cannon. "My Lord, with this much material we can make the Tier 2 cannons, and we can rebuild Titan-01 with real alloys instead of scrap! We can make them! We can make all of them!"

Silas let out a long relieved sigh and rubbed the back of his neck as a satisfied grin spread across his face. "Good. That’s what I wanted to hear... Get on it."

He gestured at the four huge guns.

"Now, what about installing them? Can you two mount these on the walls, or are we going to have to tear down half the wall to fit them?"

Solenne dug into her heavy leather satchel and whipped out a thick folded manual, snapping it open with a dramatic flap.

"We won’t need to tear anything down, my Lord!" she said, confidence surging as she pointed at the drawings of the iron wall mounts. "These mounts use a standard four-bolt anchor. They spread the firing shock across the stone... Miss Thora and I can drill the holes, seat the sleeves and bolt them down! We can handle it!"

"Cogsworth stands ready to provide wrenches, oil and light refreshments upon request, Mistress," the copper automaton added smoothly from behind her, giving his kettle a gentle rattle.

Silas chuckled and nodded. "Alright but if you have any issue with the walls, don’t force it. Call Brida... She’s the commander who guards the walls, and she knows every inch of them."

Thora nodded with a grunt.

"Aye, Brida’s good at hauling heavy iron. We’ll rope her in if the cranes get stuck plus she has pretty big boobs ehehehehehe~"